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S. M. Carvalho
Center for History School of Arts and Humanities University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal
ANTÓNIO MARIA DE BETTENCOURT RODRIGUES’ PERCEPTION
OF THE POST-WORLD WAR I WORLD
Abstract. At a time marked by the Pan-movements, authors such as António Maria de
Bettencourt Rodrigues (1854-1933) and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) interpreted the world differently in the face of the consequences left by the Great War. In this way, in the understanding of the first, the globe would divide into large groupings of nations based on ethnicracial factors, placing Latin civilization on the head of this new world organization that would lead, the short stretch, the destinies of the world. However, for Spengler, the Latins peoples were destined to oblivion in favor of the new political, economic and cultural cleavers, stating that only in antiquity had stood out among the others, thanks to the foreign policy of the Orient; two visions were confronted by the idea that the small countries and those of weak resources were harassed in the wake of Social Darwinism. As if Spengler is advised, the Portuguese author has not ceased to refer, in this way, to the German-Russian alliance and to the awakening of Asia, consequences that he understood as elements provides by the peace resulted from World War I, which establishes the need of the countries for the creation of production and export techniques that would ensure them in the Europe scale. This work presents the confrontation of two views on the concept of Empire, which was reformulated by Oswald Spengler and Bettencourt Rodrigues in different ways, but possible to establish a dialogue among themselves, in the wake of Postwar Western cravings.
Keywords: 1st Portuguese Republic; Great War; International blocs; Pan-Movements; Pan-Latinism; League of Nations.
С.М. Карвалью
Центр изучения истории Школа искусств и гуманитарных наук Университет Лиссабона Лиссабон, Португалия
МИР ПОСЛЕ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ В ВОСПРИЯТИИ АНТОНИУ МАРИИ ДЕ БЕТТАНКУР РОДРИГЕША
Аннотация. Во времена, отмеченные пан-движениями, такие авторы, как Антониу Мария де Беттанкур Родригеш (1854-1933) и Освальд Шпенглер (1880-1936), по-разному интерпретировали мир в свете последствий Великой войны. В понимании
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первого, земной шар разделится на большие объединения наций на основе этнических и расовых факторов, с помещением латинской цивилизации во главе этой новой всемирной организации, которая, на короткое время, будет руководить судьбами мира. Однако Шпенглер утверждал, что латинским народам суждено забвение из-за новых политических, экономических и культурных зон раскола, и только в древности они выделялись среди других благодаря внешней политике Востока. Этим двум видениям противостояла идея социального дарвинизма о том, что малые страны и страны со слабыми ресурсами подвергаются притеснениям. Как бы комментируя Шпенглера, португальский автор не переставал ссылаться на германо-российский альянс и на пробуждение Азии, что в его понимании представляло собой последствия послевоенного мира, благодаря которому возникает потребность стран в создании технологий производства и экспорта, которые бы обеспечивали их в масштабах Европы. Эта статья рассматривает конфронтацию двух различных взглядов - Освальда Шпенглера и Беттанкура Родригеша - на концепцию Империи, в то же время не исключая возможности установления диалога, в соответствии с послевоенными устремлениями Запада.
Ключевые слова: 1-я Португальская Республика; Великая война; Международные блоки; Пан-движения; Пан-латинизм; Лига Наций.
1.Brief biographical notes on Bettencourt Rodrigues
Among Portuguese politicians dedicated to the analysis of international politics, looms the face of António Maria de Bettencourt Rodrigues (18541933). Once exiled in Brazil, by his own initiative, between 1892 and 1913, he became one of the most attentive observers of World War I. A licensed doctor by the École de Medicine of Paris, specializing in psychiatry and a Republican aligned with the Unionist Party1, Bettencourt Rodrigues sympathized, almost until the end of his life, with the theses of Benito Mussolini2. He was nominated Minister Plenipotentiary to France on 19153, having also encouraged the creation of a Brazilian studies subject at the Sorbonne4. Nevertheless, he did not escape the epithet of «dictator»5, as he became Minister of Foreign Affairs during the military dictatorship, that would build up to the New State, between July
1Leal, Castro, Programas e Partidos: o campo partidário republicano português 1910-1926, Imprensa da Universidade, Coimbra, 2008, p.56.
2Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Uma Confederação Luso-Brasileira: opiniões, factos e alvitres,
Livraria Clássica Editora, Lisbon, 1923, p.11.
3Anuário Diplomático e Consular Português, 1915, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Imprensa Nacional, Lisbon, 1916, p.157.
4Barros, João de – «Uma Ideia a Defender: A Confederação Luso-Brasileira. Será Possível uma Grande e Nova Lusitânia?». In Barros, João de; Rio, João do (dir.), Atlantida: mensário artístico, literário e social para Portugal e Brasil. Lisbon, Year II, 15th June 1917, p. 659.
5Letter addressed to Bernardino Machado, February 24, 1928. Casa-Comum Fundação Mário Soares, DBG.
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1926 and November 19281. Bettencourt and was then responsible for the Portuguese delegation sent to the League of Nations2.
Note that Bettencourt Rodrigues published a work entitled A LusoBrazilian confederation: Opinions, Facts and instruction3, in 1923, in which he predicted a world divided into large international blocs as the unequivocal consequence of the so-called first part of The Great War. Hence, we will establish a dialogue between his work Oswald Spengler’s, revealed to the public in 1918, bearing the widely known title: The decline of the West, which presented readers with a philosophy of irreversible history through eyes of the German intellectual, to which the Portuguese diplomat politician had certainly paid due attention: indeed, his work completely opposed Spengler’s.
2. Bettencourtian work and its proximity/distance to Oswald
Spengler’s
Grouping nations by common identity factors – economic, commercial, political, ethnic-racial –, Bettencourt Rodrigues rediscovered the concept of Civilization together with the conception of Empire – approaching Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) philosophy of history – At a time marked by the so-called Pan-movements. Indeed, in a period of exacerbated nationalisms that conceived broad Vital spaces around the concept of «Imagined communities», coined by
Benedict Anderson4, the thought of the Portuguese diplomat was no exception. In this context, Rodrigues reformulated the concept of Empire through his
own understanding of the post-World War I globe. For him, the various nations would meet their counterparts, creating «great international blocs»: The AngloSaxon bloc, the German-Slavic bloc, the Latin bloc, and the Asian bloc, would fight amongst themselves to guarantee access to a part of the earth's maritime surface. In contrast to Spengler's thesis on the "negative" effect of the Roman domain over the world5, Bettencourt Rodrigues devised the formation of a Latin bloc as the safeguard of Western Civilization, inspiring himself in Benito Mussolini, and the ideas that irradiated from Fascist Italy, with special appreciation for Confederazione Pro Latina6. Therefore, Rome was to be reborn, extrapolating the idea of a purely sociological project, joining the Latin peoples in a Con-
1 Anuário Diplomático e Consular Português, 1928-1929, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tipografia Maurício e Monteiro, Lisbon, [s. d.], p.11.
2 Branco, Teresa, A participação portuguesa na Sociedade das Nações (1920-1939): representantes nacionais e funcionários internacionais, Master Thesis in International Relations and European Studies, University of Évora, 2013, p. 60.
3Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem.
4Anderson, Benedict, Comunidades Imaginadas. Reflexões sobre a origem e a expensão do nacionalismo, Colecção História&Sociedade, Edições 70, Lisbon, 2012.
5Spengler, Oswald, A Decadência do Ocidente. Esboço de uma morfologia da História
Universal, 2ª Edição, Zahar Editores, Rio de Janeiro, 1973, p. 50.
6Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 11.
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federation able to develop an economic plan, at first based on a protected trade structure and, ultimately, opening up to competition from abroad.
Interestingly, the idea of a Commonwealth – taken from the British concept – as a space of free movement and established commercial facilities, was turned into a Portuguese idea through a strengthening of relations between Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and the other Portuguese colonies, extending to Spain and the Spanish republics, attracting all the other Latins later; a bettencourtian conception of an economic-commercial space par excellence, from which Latin peoples would learn to create wealth, that is, methods of production and export that would make them self-sufficient inside their shielded economic logic, opening up to competition a posteriori, competing with so-called Great nations; consequently, they would no longer play the role of «(...) simple satellites»1.
Such conception, embodied Pan-Latinism, an idea of a transatlantic community first put forth in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, that considered itself to be the ultimate fate of Latin civilization. It was a commonplace in the Ibero-American space between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries2. However, in Bettencourt Rodrigues’ logic, it would be the peoples of the Iberian peninsula who would necessarily take up the task, resurrecting Ancient Rome with new blood, found in Latin America. With this, Bettencourt did not hesitate to answer to Spengler who had drawn up the following excerpt:
«Each culture has its own possibilities of expression, which manifest, mature, wither and never resurrect again»3.
Note that the author of The Decline of the West faced the Dominion that the Romans had exerted upon the world as nefarious4, through Darwinian ideas
–which his thought was manifestly imbued with–considering empires as a civilizational reality, meaning, when a certain culture began to Decline, it was the manifest symbol of its end, much like living organisms. In respect to such, he stated: «(...) The rhythm, the shape, the life span of all organisms are determined by the peculiarities of the species to which they belong, and the same occurs in all manifestations of life»5; He colored his reasoning with examples: «No one will suppose that a millennial oak is now at the beginning of its true evolution. No one will believe that a caterpillar, whose growth we observe day by day, may continue to grow, likewise, for years on end»6.
First of all, it should be noted that Oswald Spengler was skeptical about the Latins and all that represented the development of the West up to that moment thanks to, among other things, to the legacy from classical antiquity; He
1Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 12.
2Beired, José Luis Bendicho, «Hispanismo e latinismo no debate intelectual iberoamericano», VARIA HISTORIA, Belo Horizonte, Vol. 30, nº 54, Set./Dez. 2014, p. 632.
3Spengler, Ibidem, p. 39.
4Idem, Ibidem, p. 50.
5Idem, Ibidem, p. 38.
6Idem, Ibidem.
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wrote, «the Roman Empire [was born], not as a result of the supreme commitment of all military and financial resources (...), but thanks to the resignation of the aged orient to its self-determination in the field of foreign policy»1. For the west - and not only the heirs of ancient Rome-was the result, according to the German philosopher, of a choice emanated from the enigmatic Orient.
Following the thought of O. Spengler, António de Bettencourt Rodrigues did not cease to equate the risks that came from the eastern lands, thanks to the reborn Yellow danger; but Russia was also, to the Portuguese Republican, a matter to which Westerners would see themselves in the contingency of addressing.
The author ended his thesis by emphasizing the economic and commercial risks that the Latins would face thanks to Pan-Germanism; ideas that appeared in post-war Germany tormented him, despite the extent of its tentacles at the heart of the League of Nations, where the peoples of southern Europe - with special acuity, here, for the diligence carried out by Brazil with the International Organizationlanguished by Oxygen Balloons that would allow them to come surface in the diplomatic game of the in-between-wars period. Indeed, these countries suffered from structural problems of, with particular emphasis on agriculture, which prevented profitable productivity levels and, in general, left short surpluses for export; They found their parallel in the statistical statements of the Organization on the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.
But Rodrigues’ concerns are explained by Louis L. Snyder, in his work
Macro-nationalisms: A History of the Pan-movements. According to the aforementioned author – an American scholar who witnessed various Nazi rallies and dedicated his life to the study of these issues –, Adolph Hitler «(...) Would unite the Germans of the world from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro in a triumphant Third
Reich a goal which the eccentric Wilhelm II had failed to reach»2. Keep in mind, still in this respect, the words of Hitler in Mein Kampf, which considered «Central and Latin America (...) predominantly Romanic», while writing that the
Germans were lords of this continent for not mixing with the indigenous peoples3. Therefore, Bettencourt Rodrigues’ conception found itself haunted by these ideas with roots in Pan-movements – Nationalist movements with political, economic and cultural tendencies of a hegemonic matrix –, (re)arising in this period of military pause.
For the Portuguese Republican, due to the diversification blood In the nations, the country with the greatest commercial spirit would win – something that, according to Bettencourt, had international economic shielding as a condition, that is, by grouping nations in a reformulated concept of Empire – synon-
1Idem, Ibidem.
2Snyder, Louis L.- Macro-nationalisms: A History of the Pan-movements, Greenwood Press, New York, 1984, p. 38.
3Hitler, Adolf, A Minha Luta [Mein Kampf], Vol. I, Glaciar Edition, Revista Sábado, Lisbon,
2016, p. 367 [1st edition 1925].
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ymous with mutual aid for the author – only guaranteed by the domain (on the part of each international bloc) of a maritime portion of the terrestrial surface.
Since his thought was an unequivocal consequence of the peace of Geneva, Bettencourt Rodrigues was not satisfied; Hence, Spenglerian idea The Decline of the West, had to confront itself, during the period between wars, with the idealism that came from the different countries placed to the West (which does not mean that others did not have their matrixes and conceptions of the same aspect). Therefore, the work of Spengler may be seen as a response to this range of ideas being also conceived in the context of great movements that sought the rehabilitation of different nations or on the contrary, foresaw their unequivocal end in a conception lost somewhere, but which, at the time, was on the mouths of the world: A new international order. Far from the profound idealism that devastated Europe and the world during the 1920s, is not the panoply of ideas that found their space within the League of Nations' doors.
3. The German-Slavic alliance according to Bettencourt Rodrigues
According to Louis L. Snyder, if in 1898 the Pan-Germanic league devised a list of policies to adopt, filling the 22nd point with: «Increase in the number of German commercial consuls in the Levant, Far East, South Africa, Central, and South America»1; and even though it is certain that the League was more successful in Brazil, where thousands of Germans had emigrated at the end of the 19th Century»2, to the extent that «(...) A German law providing that emigrants who failed to register and pay a fee for the providing that emigrants who failed to register and pay a fee for the privilege during ten years after their emigration, would forfeit their right to German citizenship»3, in the eyes of Pangermanic leaders, «Germans remained Germans no matter where they went»4. Through this, we should establish a dialogue with what Miranda Sacuntala wrote in the work Portugal: The vicious circle of Dependence (1890-1939).
The author pondered upon this period of «augmentation of economic conflict»5, arguing Portugal was a «microcosm»6 in which British and German imperialisms confronted each other7. If before the First World War, trade between Germany and Portugal had been increasing, according to Miranda, in 1897, with the increase of German business travelers among the Portuguese, with the intent
1Snyder, Ibidem, pp. 46-47.
2Idem, Ibidem.
3Idem, Ibidem.
4Idem, Ibidem.
5Miranda, Sacuntala de – Portugal: O Círculo Vicioso da Dependência (1890-1939),
Colecção Terra Nostra, Editorial Teorema, Lisbon, [s. d.], p. 110.
6Idem, Ibidem.
7Idem, Ibidem.
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of «studying the details of Portuguese trade»1, and in 1908 a trade treaty between Portugal and Germany (following the regicide)2 would establish German influence on the Atlantic coast from 6 July 1910 (with its entry into force)3; In the appearance of the cessation of hostilities, in December 1921, through an exchange of notes, Portugal reestablished a trade agreement with the Germans, Portugal attributed the country the position of a most favored nation4. Yet, the agreement was denounced in June 1922 by German default; in the 1st of October, 19235, Portugal signed a new interim agreement through an exchange of notes, following similar parameters6.
From this, the work of Bettencourt Rodrigues – present in this context - assumes the contours of a publication manifestly opposed to trading agreements between Portugal and Germany if they could come to be established. In any case, correspondence between the two countries extended the trade agreement signed in Berlin on the 28th of April of the same year7. In this way, we must pay attention to Bettencourt’s thesis: Germany would expand eastward, creating, through the fragments of the former Austrian Empire and with European and Asian Russia – «From the North Sea to the Sea of Behring»8 -, a grouping of approximately 200 million inhabitants9; The perfect dominion over the sea between the British Isles and the eastern coast of Alaska. At the same time, the diplomat seemed to want to force the idea: it was would cause Germany to back away from Portuguese colonies and our Brazil if Luzo-brasileirism found infrastructure.
Nevertheless, in the British report (of the end of the Great War) entitled
«Report on the Commerce and Finance of Portugal (No. 75)»10, it was written that Germany sought to take over Portuguese trade through a double route: «(...)
The capture of the Portuguese markets themselves, through the supply of cheap freight in their commercial shipping lines to the Mediterranean and the South Atlantic, which, with increasing frequency, made stops in Lisbon, and through
1Idem, Ibidem, p. 111.
2Idem, Ibidem, p. 113.
3Idem, Ibidem.
4Idem, Ibidem, p. 120.
5«Acordo, por troca de notas, entre Portugal e a Alemanha, de l de Outubro de 1923 (…)»,
Line 121, in Arquivo e Biblioteca do MNE, Colecção de Tratados, Convenções e Actos Públicos entre Portugal e as mais potências: 1922-1923. Link: http://www.fmsoares.pt/aeb/biblioteca/indices_resumos/indices/011820.htm
6Miranda Ibidem, p. 121.
7«Acordo, por troca de notas, entre Portugal e a Alemanha, de l de Outubro de 1923, prorrogando o Acordo Comercial provisório assinado em Berlim aos 28 de Abril de 1923», linha 121, in Arquivo e Biblioteca do MNE, Colecção de Tratados, Convenções e Actos Públicos entre Portugal e as mais potências: 1922-1923. URL: http://www.fmsoares.pt/aeb/biblioteca/indices_resumos/indices/011820.htm
8Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 31.
9Idem, Ibidem.
10Miranda, Ibidem, p. 118.
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the offer of cheap credits to local agents»; And yet, «more important was the offensive to take over the vast African territories under Portuguese sovereignty, thus establishing its financial preponderance in Lisbon»1.
We speak precisely of what Bettencourt Rodrigues is debating in his work, which is nothing more than a response to German preponderance – inserted in a position of the Great War allies, even before the conflict hatched –; without forgetting that, before it, Germany was one of the most important trading partners of Brazil (and also of Portugal), and between 1920-1921, a new approximation would take place, during of Epitácio Pessoa’s negotiations on the German war reparations2, underlining that, at the negotiating table, the Brazilian representatives had not been considered equal by the Allies. However, antagonisms would continue (see, for example, the dilemma of the exportation of Brazilian coffee by the Germans)3, moreover, when Germany entered the League of Nations in 1926, Brazil left the organism two years later4.
Bettencourt equated the importance of Brazil to Portugal and foresaw the resurgence of Germany in economic diplomacy thanks to Russia, fearing the breadth of her desires, including those related to Africa, considering that, in the
League, the topic of the «internationalization of colonial Territories» was starting to surface5.
At the same time, Russia was rebuilding her industry and agriculture6. Bettencourt Rodrigues believed she would become a new export center in the short run, taking its mineralogical and cereal riches into account, a logic that seemed to be surfacing as the truth, as the NEP (New Economic policy) was being put into practice7.
Inside the Bettencourtian position, the occasion was ripe for the creation of a production-generating space made up of German-Slavic wealth born from an alliance between Germany and Russia, which was regarded as an unequivocal consequence of peace. The idea that the Germans were clearly Germanic, no matter what place they stood in, was cherished by the diplomat, and, therefore, «the ill-insured wall of new states, created by the Treaty of Peace between Germany and Russia (...)», was not a serious obstacle to Bettencourt Rodrigues in the wake of such an approximation8. The neighbor-like relationship of Central and Eastern Europe was hence helped by the communion of interests between
1Idem, Ibidem, p. 119.
2Rinke, Stefan – «Alemanha e Brasil, 1870-1945: uma relação entre espaços». In História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos. Rio de Janeiro: 2013, p. 9. URL: http://www.scielo.br/hcsm DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702014005000007
3Idem, Ibidem, p. 4.
4Milza, Pierre, As Relações Internacionais de 1918 a 1939, Edições 70 Lisbon, 2007, p. 35.
5Alexandre, Valentim – Velho Brasil/Novas Áfricas. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2000, pp.
239-240.
6Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 28.
7Kenez, Peter, História da União Soviética, Editions 70, Lisbon, 2014, p. 64.
8Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 31.
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the shortcomings of Leninist Russia and the exodus of expert German workers to rebuild the Russian army, railways, and agriculture, as Lenin admitted to a foreign journalist1.
The author pointed out that before the conflict Germany had entered Russian territory through the banking establishments, the monopoly of most of the iron, coal, sugar, and wheat, and other major industries, a process that, before 1914, the country adopted when it came to Italy, as Bettencourt put it. Indeed, he made reference to G. Preziosi’s work in A Confederação Luso-Brasileira, referring to the subject using the title La Germania alla Conquest dell Italia2. From this, the diplomat approached the issue in question to prove the growing German danger to the Latins, and the motive that led Oswald Spengler to speak in the inexorable decline of the latter, speaking of the end of the Roman legacy under the pressure of the contemporary world.
According to Rodrigues, the German-Slavic alliance would go as far as expected: Germany would be reconstituted with territories taken to Russia and Poland3, putting such forward as a concession that the country of the Soviets would have to watch happen, since it was necessary living space for the German populous4. In that context, in 1922, when the Treaty of Rappallo was signed, the West thought it had fallen into the Cape of Storms; it resulted in a waiver of all territorial and financial claims between the Russians and the Germans: diplomatic relations would be normalized with the aim of supplying the economic needs of the German-Russian economy, enabling Russia to train troops on its own soil. That is why Jean-Baptiste Duroselle speaks of this treaty as a German outline to the «(...) Treaty of Versailles»5. In other words, the West was confronted with its choices, the eminent decadence of which Spengler spoke coincided with the occasion. The west was snatched up in the path of German negotiations in one of the central periods of the journey to the epilogue of The Great War.
It was the international legitimation of Soviet Russia and the German response to Western austerity, followed by other pacts between the two nations until the eruption of World War II. The publication of Oswald Spengler's work during this time should not, in that sense, cause us any strangeness.
It should be noted that Germany saw a strategic partner in Russia partner from a commercial, economic and military standpoint, since Russia based is reformulation in the German steel industry, reconsidered the war in the Russian space; something that Bettencourt kept in mind. But, it should be stressed, his thesis based itself up the hegemony of the seas, which, according to his ideals, came in the wake of the isolationist phenomenon which, consequently, forced
1Idem, Ibidem, p. 35.
2Idem, Ibidem, p. 33
3Idem, Ibidem, p. 32.
4Snyder, Ibidem, pp. 56-57.
5Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, História das Relações Internacionais de 1919 a 1945, Tomo I, 12ª Edição, Edições texto&grafia, Lisbon, 2001, p. 70.
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another way of acting: the reestablishment of the commercial space (which Germany was achieving), emphasizing that, with the Great War, the logic of the commercial multilateralism had ceased. Thus, the German-Slavic slice was found from the North Sea to the Sea of Behring on the coasts of the United States of America, bringing the risks the Latins, Englishmen, Americans and Japanese faced into the foreground, if Germany was able to revive her shipping lines or acquire others that would lead her to take control of older ones.
It should be noted Germany held only one less line of navigation, before the war, then the queen of the Seas: «(...) Three for South America, one for India, four for northern Europe, one for the Congo, one for the Mediterranean, one for Australia and one for the ports of the Levant»1. Therefore, Rodrigues intended to safeguard the South Atlantic for the Lusitanians and to make Lisbon «The port of Europe», a possibility that, before the war, the Germans had demonstrated through their navigational lines, using the Portuguese capital as a stopover In many cases.
Therefore, «A Greater Portugal» was to be first, and «A Greater Latin Confederation» was to come after. Such were Bettencourt Rodrigues’ projects, designed as a private condominium of the South Atlantic – a bridge connecting to Latins’ America (and only of these and for these) – where Pan-Germanism had found its place, at a time when «Greater Germany»2 called for a logic of reestablishment: it equated what Germany was (at the time) with what Germany had the right to be. Moreover, her alliance with Russia was foreseen as an imbalance on the scales for European and Asian nations. And if the German-Slavic alliance never came to be as was forecasted – leading to the formation of a «Germano-Slavic bloc»3 - there was a bold approach between the two countries in the in-between-wars period, despite the invasion of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Finland, having been the hub of support for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Bettencourt would not live long enough to attend such, although he understood, in 1923, the challenge that these nations posed to the world in the second part of the Great War. Indeed, we must focus on the paradigm of German expansion, as we had the opportunity to mention, either in Period of vivid reminiscences in which Central Europe was observed and pseudo-dominated.
In the short run, our author anticipated that the country of the Soviets would be the first with which the Westerners (depleted post-I World War) would count on for future negotiations4. In of Bettencourt Rodrigues' perspective, the alliance between Germany and Russia was regarded as an endogenous consequence, as well as a prelude to war. The first was considered by Bettencourt as being «(...) Germanic, Celtic and Slavic» in its roots. The author would write, in
1Miranda, Ibidem, p. 116.
2Snyder, Ibidem, p. 61.
3Bettencourt-Rodrigues, Ibidem, p. 23.
4Idem, Ibidem, p. 29.
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